Twitterrific has been discontinued
blog.iconfactory.com
blog.iconfactory.com
Right from the bird’s mouth, which by the way, they created, not Twitter…
“Since 2007, Twitterrific helped define the shape of the Twitter experience. It was the first desktop client, the first mobile client, one of the very first apps in the App Store, an Apple Design award winner, and it even helped redefine the word “tweet” in the dictionary. Ollie, Twitterrific’s bluebird mascot, was so popular it even prompted Twitter themselves to later adopt a bluebird logo of their very own. Our little app made a big dent on the world!”
And “pull-to-refresh”? Tweetie.
Twitter has always given a proud middle finger to third party clients to suit its own strategy. Firehose access terminated to analytics companies after it acquired Gnip:
"...After acquiring Gnip in May of 2014, we decided to bring all data licensing activity in-house in order to better serve our customers and partners..."
When they acquired Tweetdeck in 2011, they started cutting off apps who "'mimic' products, services and experiences that Twitter itself offers"
They banned apps like UberMedia (UberTwitter), twidroyd and UberCurrent over trademarks and having the audacity to offer DM longer than 140 chars. There are dozens of more instances. They have literally never been a platform or ecosystem friendly company. Ever. They used 3rd party apps to gain traction than killed them.
How is this recent behavior any different?
At least as far as I can tell everyone is still using it with rare exceptions. The people most likely to post alarmist and FUDy stuff also tends to be the people least likely to abandon social media for some higher social/moral purposes.
Once enough time passes and we have enough inside information (and less current day emotion) we'll be able to better analyze these decisions and trends from a macro perspective. Twitter encourages debating things immediately with limited information on overall strategy and actual outcomes/consequences, so ironically I'm also critiquing the very thing Twitter morphed the Zeitgeist into, but oh well.
In terms of actual content it's a very marginal difference for the vast majority of people I'm sure.
Slightly more people posting angry outraged tweets != twitter content being significantly worse.
The technical failure complaints/predictions will probably find more purchase on HN, despite the feeds being much of the same.
I'm very skeptical Entertainment Tonight style negative PR for Twitter's business ops is what is bad for Twitter as a product for normal day-to-day users. Note: I'm not talking about what's bad for society, if that's what mattered The National Enquirer wouldn't have topped newspaper sales long ago.
At some point, you have to ask yourself if it's worth typing out and posting something that would be ChatGPT's response to "write a Hacker News comment decrying Elon Musk".
As a pretty avid Twitter user, I'm still enjoying it.
None of the situations you highlight involved a) zero advance warning b) a week of radio silence from Twitter c) lies from Twitter about the behavior of those banned and d) an after-the-fact change to the rules.
Twitter was not, well, Twitter without the users and developers. Hashtags, replies, threads…users and developers. Not the product managers.
And that’s relevant because: if you’re developing a product today, probably worth thinking about how so many features and practices are an emergent property of how it’s used, and not what you are narrowly planning for.
Actually though, I absolutely hate that Chrome iOS has pull-to-refresh. I've never in my life wanted to refresh a page by pulling and instead what happens is once or twice a month I'm filling out a form or typing a post and I need to scroll up. I do it instinctively, chrome refreshes, I lose everything I just typed. Thanks Chrome
It was originally "pull to load newer posts". Remember that a twitter timeline would have the newest posts at the top and the older posts below it. So when a user would return to the app, they would keep scrolling up until they reached the top. Then if they kept scrolling triggering the iOS rubber-banding behavior, it would load newer posts. Then the newer posts would be rendered above where you were in the list.
Refreshing the whole page wasn't the intended purpose.
One fundamental point of the interaction is that you're already scrolling to the top of the list because you're viewing a reverse-chronologically-sorted list of network-driven content. If, after hitting the top of the list, you keep trying to scroll up, you're already suggesting to the software that you want to see more. On a website, this implication doesn't apply. I'm just trying to get to the top of the page.
BTW, the Firefox-flavored Safari skin has a regular refresh button.
At the time I thought of building a client but the dependence on Twitter seemed like a huge risk. More fool me though given that those companies were taken over for a decent amount.
Also hard to overstate the impact the new ownership has had, such that their assessment is now:
>>"...an increasingly capricious Twitter – a Twitter that we no longer recognize as trustworthy nor want to work with any longer."
This, from people that partnered with Twitter for a decade++
The new owner had a lot of us, me included, fooled into thinking he was intelligent and trustworthy. Now, it is obvious he's neither.
Wealth reveals character, and it is sad to see that that character is so rotten.
feel like this is probably demonstrably wrong, but too lazy to google it.
i'd go more with, 'wealth can allow one to become monster', or 'wealth creates monsters', or similar.
the difference is 'creates' vs 'reveals'.
i.e. give anyone a billion dollars and watch most of them become monsters, probably. and one might turn out to be like mackenzie scott.
give everyone a hundred bucks and make them dependent on each other for survival, and watch antisocial behavior drop to near-zero near-instantaneously -- i.e. no monsters.
wealth creates power.
power corrupts.
it's why socialism has always probably been the answer. and if not that, then some semblence of equality - of power, in particular.
if people are able to operate largely without consequence, then they might act in antisocial ways - like musk, in this particular example.
but you wouldn't have to go outside your own daily lived experience to find all sorts of people doing all sorts of bad things because they are relatively unaccountable - they don't face real consequences for their behavior.
But:
> if people are able to operate largely without consequence, then they might act in antisocial ways - like musk, in this particular example
Not trying to defend the guy, but come on - he bought a company, took it private, and he is now free to ruin it as he sees fit. That’s not antisocial behaviour. He’s just making the decisions he thinks are best for Twitter (even if I disagree with them).
And we have to consider the fact that when a celebrity does something, it is blown to a much bigger proportion by the media. Some random small business owner blocking third parties? Nobody cares, most apps aren’t even that open to begin with. Elon Musk does it? “What an antisocial monster corrupted by power and money”
Meanwhile, murderers face real consequences for their behaviour, and you see it happening anyway, so your thesis that bad behaviour only happens because people are unaccountable is demonstrably false.
> Not trying to defend the guy, but come on - he bought a company, took it private, and he is now free to ruin it as he sees fit.
your argument seems pretty amoral - like, you don't expect musk to even have a sense of right and wrong, much less try to act in a manner which many/most would consider decently.
> And we have to consider the fact that when a celebrity does something, it is blown to a much bigger proportion by the media.
> your thesis that bad behaviour only happens because people are unaccountable is demonstrably false.
but is bad / antisocial behaviour much more likely when expected to be relatively free of consequences? i'd almost bet my life on it. maybe there's some wrinkle i haven't thought of yet, but it doesn't seem like rocket science.
Official Twitter Statement on Revoking API Access to 3rd Party Devs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34416416 - Jan 2023 (11 comments)
Twitter kicking off a developer API campaign on January 16, 2023 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34410624 - Jan 2023 (107 comments)
Tweetbot is back down again - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34396664 - Jan 2023 (210 comments)
The Shit Show - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34393485 - Jan 2023 (312 comments)
Twitter API Page - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34387834 - Jan 2023 (98 comments)
Twitter's API is down? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34363743 - Jan 2023 (408 comments)
To be clear, this statement was a lie. They added the "long-standing policy" today, retroactively. https://www.engadget.com/twitter-new-developer-terms-ban-thi...
(Musk also promised a vote on major policy changes. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604616863673208832)
After saying he would be stepping back from Twitter in short order under oath in the Tesla shareholder lawsuit.
But a Musk promise only being delivered long after the initially-stated timeframe, if ever, is hardly abnormal.
They don't need to be involved, they want to be involved, and they have the legal backing to do so.
I'm not sure how this would be any different than other software projects that use an API they don't own. Things like Cider for Apple Music, Ripcord for Slack, and the many Spotify clients all come to mind. Perhaps those are less aggressive in pursing 3rd party clients?
Twitter is an advertising company. Alternative clients do not show Twitter's ads nor return to Twitter user data, so Twitter makes no money when alternative clients get used but still incurs bandwidth costs. There is no profit, only cost, in providing an exchange for short text messages; the profit all comes in the advertising, and that requires control of the client UI.
The issue is why can't Twitter charge for tweets via their API, but offer them for free in a browser if they are served alongside ads. Perhaps their own internal research suggests so few people would be willing to pay that it wouldn't be worth maintaining the API, but it would be nice to hear more info about this.
Now, Discord doesn't need to sue anyone to stop me from using a third party client—the threat of being banned is enough deterrent to keep me on the official client.
From the people at Discord:
> I run the infrastructure department at Discord which includes our anti-spam engineering team -- Just want to +1 what you're saying and confirm that we are never trying to ban third party clients (that aren't self-bots). Honestly, it would be a waste of our time and basically do nothing good for Discord.
Heh. To save some people a click: An important figure in the iOS jailbreaking scene (maker of the foundational tweaking framework and app store).
Thanks for all the good times. Jailbreaking was great for my experimentation urge and taught me a lot about Unix. It also informed some software opinions I still hold today (much more things should work like WinterBoard's layering). A jailbreakable iOS device is a great educational toy for a kid interested in messing with technology (Amazon Kindles are good for this too, by the way).
And thanks for also being involved in legally defending these freedoms. (I've been waiting for a chance to say this without writing a completely unproductive comment)
(I say this not because I think it should be a crime, but because I think the CFAA is a terribly broad law)
I really miss the iOS jailbreak ecosystem--back before Apple really started to win--as I felt like I could just build whatever I wanted (as long as it was legal and I definitely had lots of lawyers to check some of the stuff I had wanted to release ;P) and push it without asking for permission from Big Tech :(.
But it’s not really like that for Twitter. They can do rapid updates to the iOS and Android apps, and any holdovers of old client versions would be a relatively small segment.
I recall Microsoft tried to build and maintain their own YouTube client for Windows Phone around 2011-12. That’s probably the last time a major tech company tried this approach and it was out of massive desperation. Google seemed to make a special effort to break the app.
(And, even then, most of the success for Snapchat comes because 1) the official clients for Snapchat go far out of their way to do crazy obfuscation techniques and 2) they wield a ban hammer over end users over trivial infractions making it difficult to test; I fail to see how such would work for YouTube, where third-party clients are, in fact, plentiful).
At F8 back forever ago, the reason Zuckerberg cited for having to give up on "Move Fast and Break Things" and go to "Move Fast with Stable Infra" is because they in fact couldn't rapidly push updates to their apps across the myriad supported platforms the way they could with their website, and so they effectively had to maintain API compatibility across ridiculously long timespans of client versions... much long enough to let the alternative clients reverse engineer the new builds and have updates out before Facebook can just kill service to the old ones.
They can do rapid updates to the apps but doesn't it take time for users to apply the update? Where I work you can't expect people to update their app right away, it takes days or even weeks for people to catch up.
That's not really a thing once you involve software. It's trivial to lock things down using cryptography and constant changes, making any kind of interoperability entirely infeasible.
As far as I understand this is pretty unprecedented and very bad for an efficient market.
Sort of! I haven't updated my iOS install in many months. I don't see the new fake blue checks or a handful of other dumb new features, it's kind of great!
Can they? Do they not go through the usual review process?
All your suggestions lead to a terms of service violation for the Icon Factory and would likely result in their Apple developer accounts being banned, especially if Elon wanted to pursue it.
Getting their developer accounts banned would affect their other products, as well as any future products.
Aside from all the above, the vast majority of their Twitterrific customers doesn't understand API keys and will complain and request app and subscription refunds, likely also leading to developer account problems.
Falken's Law applies here: The only winning move is not to play.
Well, it may not be a felony, but I wouldn't bet my business on something like this if I was small. Likelihood of a lawsuit and all.
> Apple is willing to step in to remove apps that hurt fellow Big Tech companies
Not clear to me that they would be willing, are there any historical examples?
I kept it going for 3 years because I cared about the people who used it, and the developer struggled to block it because it's hard to outwit someone who worked on web browsers. In the end though, it's not worth doing free work for a company that doesn't respect the needs of their customers. Go elsewhere.
You can just use attestation to make sure that people are using the official twitter client and not a third party one. There is no cat and mouse game no that mobile platforms offer security against malicious third party clients.
Ceding users' screens doesn't work with an ad-based business model.
Hopefully this now gets more support with the antics that Twitter has pulled with these 3rd party clients.
You wanna shut them down to show more ads? Fine. But at least communicate and let them know upfront. What a sh*t show.
Or for the users of those apps.
Is this the sound of nails hammering into Twitter Blue's coffin? An obvious premium feature would have been API tokens.
It's not the first time we've seen something like this. Youtube is infamously harsh on alternative clients and Spotify went from the most developer-friendly streaming service to one of the least friendly… the former because third party clients can cut out ads, the latter because third party clients stymy efforts to drive users towards more profitable content instead of what they really want to listen to.
Third party clients also don't really mesh with Musk's "everything app" aspirations but that's probably moot because I don't see Twitter becoming one of those any time soon.
It's still shitty that Twitter still hasn't been up front and definitive about the status of the API, none of this is new just because of Elon.
Lesson learned: don't build your business on top of someone else's business, especially if you're not paying (under contract) to access that other service.
As predicted here: [0] when a third-party Discord client had to shut down [1] because Discord Inc. controlled the platform, the same has happened to Twitter.
You make hay whilst the sunshines.
If you can make money from an App, then do so.
Of course you have to diversify; dont put all your eggs in one basket.
But if there is an opportunity to make money, then go make it.
You can build your name on a high profile popular product, even if the product is short lived.
Businesses and product lines dont generally last forever! :-)
Something like a Twitter client is not only not part of their core business of selling ads but diametrically opposed to it so you have a much higher risk of unexpectedly being out of business because their success is not directly linked to yours. Arguments about innovation, bringing in super users, etc. are good but they're more tenuous and exactly the kind of thing some executive will dismiss when compared to the money they can make right now with more ad sales.
In contrast, Twitter sees third-party developers as a cost.
The lesson is not that building on the services of others is bad. It was good. But you don’t get to choose when it will end.
These people built successful businesses for nigh a decade, and even if they were eventually shut off due to a change in ownership, they still presumably earned ample profit.
Personally, I've built a business on top of someone else's platform (Valve) and it was hugely beneficial for me even though I was very aware I could be cut off at any point. All businesses are a gamble, pick what gambles you want to take and be honest about their upsides and downsides.
It’s literally what the core service is and there’s a built in revenue share (contract) between the developers and Valve.
No such construct nor intent existed with Twitter.
Not necessarily. I'm not selling a game on Steam, I built my business providing a third party service around one of Valve's self-developed games. Generally speaking, Valve is friendlier to developers so it was a safer bet, but it was in no way a contract nor guaranteed.
Twitter actually used to promote third party apps in their sidebar. Even though they long ago made it clear that third party apps were being hamstrung, for quite some time they actually encouraged third party apps being developed and didn't bother them too much beyond limiting their access to the streaming API.
He literally couldn’t care about anything that doesn’t affect his own experience of the product. Features, clients, parts of the world, even users - if Elon isn’t interested then it will probably go or be ignored.
We know Twitter is careening towards bankruptcy under his management. There are other factors at play. But the buck stops with him, and the buck is getting fucked.
Wow they really helped make Twitter what it is today
What is needed is to do Twitter again, in some way that is more open and supportive of client apps, but still has the immediacy and global search that Twitter has. Mastodon has its uses, but it isn't a real replacement. Twitter was always a terrible business, but an incredibly useful idea. The idea needs to exist.
Seems like what you should be asking for is Mastodon, but with performance improvements and improved search.
Or the global community of people with some technical proficiency keeps developing Mastodon (or forks, or OSS replacements) so that it is a real replacement.
My stance on future Twitter-like proprietary social networks is clear and unequivocal: Never again.
It’s ran for over a decade, not a bad run. I’d very much be surprised if Mastodon instances last that long.
Decentralisation brings its own major issues, it’s not a silver bullet. Thinking that Mastodon-like services will take over is a pipe dream.
Proprietary services aren’t inherently bad as long as their business model aligns with your interests. The problem is that the current business model of social media is “growth & engagement”, not actual money from end-users. This means the relationship between the provider and the user is always adversarial and there’s an incentive to pull tricks like this so you steer users back into the malicious, official client to collect more data and/or harass them with dark patterns.
It is absolutely possible to build and operate a sustainable social media platform by charging a monthly token sum for the service. The only reason it’s not done nowadays is because there is no room for new players to enter - without interoperability either enforced by law (EU digital markets law?) or adversarial interoperability being made legal (the law is currently abused to prevent that), a new general-purpose social platform is a non-starter regardless of the underlying business model.
How much captive audience whinging have we had to endure in that time? Twitter bans Joe Blow. Twitter should ban Joe Blow. Twitter shouldn't have banned Joe Blow. Twitter bans third party app. Twitter has too many bots. Twitter doesn't have enough bots. Twitter censors subject X. Twitter drowned a puppy (allegedly). Twitter releases feature Y (finally). Twitter demands phone numbers for better ad surveillance. Twitter makes new release that totally fucks over the way you use it. Twitter should support my desired usage pattern. Twitter stops software from working on older devices. And so on ad infinitum.
The breath of fresh air, which is actually just how things were before the web 2.0 catastrophe, is that libre software and libre services escape that centralized crab bucket. If you want a feature go ahead and build it, or donate to those who did/will. Or just wait, because rather than being a tug of war over what one piece of software should do, many different ones can bloom.
If you want the features a centralized service can bring, use a large server that implements them, which will develop over time. And if it turns out they just develop the same monetization pathologies that Twitter had, you can easily move on without changing everything. The less costs to switching there are, the easier it is to go your own way. That's the benefit of an open protocol.
I know him blocking access to third party apps might not be related but it sets a precendent (which already everyone knows) that doing business with him is not safe.
Before Apollo, only Baconreader came close.
Reddit does have access to capital, one of their owners is Tencent.
Thanks!
I just prefer Ivory’s UI. For me, it’s a nicer app to use.
I do like Metatext but development is paused (repo is archived) - and notifications appear to have stopped working. I'll probably end up back on Toot! at some point.
(Tried building my own version from the repo but it breaks for some reason and I'm not an iOS dev who can figure out why.)
And if a company officer is shorting the company’s stock, that sounds an awful lot like a breach of fiduciary duty.
No one has yet found a way that he'll profit from Twitter's decline. So he's obviously doing what he thinks is best, it is seemingly going strongly in the opposite direction, but only time will tell how it ends up.
One thing's almost certain, he's not going to make money running Twitter into the ground.
(Of course most recently I had settled on TweetBot, which was an amazing iOS Twitter client)
Some stuff about Twinkle, since I didn't see anyone else talking about it:
https://web.archive.org/web/20080718210738/http://tapulous.c...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RSB2MT01BQ
In the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t seem all that difficult to have phased in an access fee for the API that’s charged to the app developers. There are lots of ways you could do this.
From Twitter’s perspective, they’d get all the advantages of the third party ecosystem while externalising the risk of moving to a paid model.
Twitter could have kept the “advertising supported” business to itself, at least for a while, while watching the competing apps settle on a price point.
I mean the data this would have given Twitter about monetisation would have been fantastic. And at some point they could have released their own paid version too.
Oh well. I suppose Elon knows what he is doing.
- Twitter apps had the reputation at one point of being “UI playgrounds” — a good place for designers to experiment with different ideas around presentation of the feed; while Twitter didn’t directly benefit from it, these apps provided a massive amount of design iteration that enabled Twitter to steal the best ideas
A lot of these users are just going away - not migrating to a different app.
I'd question the 'benefit' bit; this seems clearly bad for Twitter.
But none of it holds a candle to TweetBot or Twitterific.
no connection / satisfied user
Disclaimer: I'm the creator of Fritter
Could you say a little about how Fritter works without an API key? Is it just because it isn't designed for posting or interacting with Twitter, just reading/viewing it? Why/how does Fritter still work when Twitterrific etc. are dead? Are you just, like, scraping the website? Isn't Twitter making it harder to read tweets from the open web when you're not logged in?
[0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/userscripts/id1463298887
[1] https://github.com/insin/tweak-new-twitter#tweak-new-twitter
Is there any potential upside to suing?
edit:
> Twitter may immediately terminate or suspend this Agreement, any rights granted herein, and/or your license to the Licensed Materials, at its sole discretion at any time, for any reason by providing notice to you.
Only possible wiggle room is they didn't do the "providing notice" bit.
Is it because third party clients don't show adverts and it is feeling the pinch?
Or for some other reason?
But you can likely guess that this is about ads.
Makes sense.
If they did shut down the whole API I was ready to make an argument about how public APIs can be costly to maintain because they're not used by first party software. But again, that's not the case, so I think we're left with the ads explanation.
They also seem determined to show people the algorithmic timeline, so a client that actually listens to you would fight that.
this sucks overall though.
> Customer: This makes me so sad. Your iPhone app allowed me as a blind person to use Twitter so much better than the app that they themselves produce. Sorry for the hostility you are receiving from them, but know that you are appreciated for the hard work you’ve done.
> Twitterrific: Maybe the best thing anyone's ever told us. Thank you for this, truly. It is everything. Please take care.
https://mobile.twitter.com/RustyHilliard77/status/1616174474...
Can you blame him? He hasn’t needed it until now. His companies either specialize in binary-outcome engineering challenges (rocket flies/explodes) or products where Musk himself is the user, like a kid designing his own toys (and calling them “S/3/X/Y”). Turns out that a lot of people want to drive the car that he wants to drive himself, so he probably thinks this impeccable taste applies to any kind of product.
But Twitter, unlike a car, is used by hundreds of millions of people in thousands of completely different ways. He has no idea of what the experience is like for someone with only a handful of followers, or blind, or trans, or Algerian, or retired, a teenage girl, a suicidal anorexic, etc. etc. — and he doesn’t seem at all interested in trying to understand.
It was reasonably obvious to other people - those who have and have not ran a rocket company - that running Twitter is different to running Tesla.
If you’re blindsided by your own ego, it’s your fault and you’re to blame.
Mindreading much?
Yes, chiefly so.
I do not think that the problem is empathy.
It's about not understanding his role in the company. It's about not understanding collaboration, team work or leadership.
He does lack empathy, thou.
Well to be fair, there's several thousand less employees now.
The problem facing Twitter 2.0 is that Musk is personally driving product development and 𝘩𝘦 𝘩𝘢𝘴 𝘦𝘴𝘴𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺 𝘯𝘰 𝘦𝘮𝘱𝘢𝘵𝘩𝘺.
I fixed that for ya
Absolutely. Good business owners know their limits and how to utilize people that have the skills they don't have. It doesn't matter if he "hasn't needed to do it before." He's an adult with multiple companies under his belt. He should absolutely know better and that fact that he doesn't is breaking trust consumers have with his ability to lead efffectively.
So if you want to cut costs on sales and marketing in your startup, internalize that, because customer acquisition costs are directly related to your not understanding of that principle.
Good thing such a high profile influencer will hammer that point home!
They just documented it. Another after-the-fact policy like @elonjet got.
https://www.engadget.com/twitter-new-developer-terms-ban-thi...
"The 'restrictions' section of Twitter’s developer agreement was updated Thursday with a clause banning 'use or access the Licensed Materials to create or attempt to create a substitute or similar service or product to the Twitter Applications.' The addition is the only substantive change to the 5,000-word agreement."
Anyone with a shred of empathy would've given devs advance notice of "we're destroying your business".
Most companies don't do that!
> "Twitter is arguably already the least wrong source of truth on the Internet, but we obviously still have a long way to go.
> Enabling @CommunityNotes to operate at very large scale and providing maximum transparency about how Twitter works are fundamental to building trust."
It's maximum shamelessness.
I had the same thought, it's really weird right? Companies make statements that present themselves in a positive light and can really stretch language, that's not weird.
But companies don't usually go full "there are four lights", "The rules have always said this" and I don't see the point? Nobody believes this so why say it. "We shut down the API." by itself is better. Saying nothing might even be better.
This is like a lie a little kid might invent on the spot when caught breaking a rule. And the kid realizes how ridiculous it sounds right after they finished speaking.
> "Developers ask us if they should build client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience," he wrote.
> "The answer is no."
Twitter to Devs: Don't Make Twitter Clients... Or Else [2011]
https://www.engadget.com/twitter-new-developer-terms-ban-thi...
> In fact, Twitter previously changed its developer policies in 2021 to remove a section that discouraged — but didn't prohibit — app makers from "replicating" its core service. The change was part of a broader shift by Twitter to improve its relationship with developers, including the makers of third-party clients.
The guidelines they introduced in 2011:
https://web.archive.org/web/20211105230857/https://developer...
See the section titled "If you create a service that replicates Twitter’s core experience or features you will be subject to additional rules beyond what is already included in the Developer Policy."
It very clearly permits clients like Tweetbot and Twitteriffic. It only applies additional conditions to them, which they've entirely complied with.
All of the people gloating about how much Musk overpaid when he was forced to buy their favorite thing should have expected that as a result he'd have to do anything to squeeze revenue out of it.
> That was never a rule, and they removed the last vestiges of the guideline entirely a couple years ago.
I wasn't aware that traces of this guideline lasted until just a couple of years ago.
It's not at all radical, and if it'd been done with a month's warning, I think there'd have been grumbling but that'd be about it.
Destroying a number of small businesses without warning (and letting them swing in the wind for a week waiting for a "why", and lying about them breaking "long-standing" rules) in this nature was entirely unnecessary, and is what has generated the backlash.
Right.
So a company builds a system that sits on another system to do a thing, charges for a thing, shuts down that thing, and then asks their customers to not ask for a refund for the thing on the thing that is broken...seems a bit....icky
If I pay for something and don't get the promised value why should I be the one who eats it?
This is going to hurt the dev but that's business and I'm sure their bank balance is doing just fine. Appealing to the users like this feels unfair.
It doesn't matter that its an app for Twitter, you've paid for someone to provide something they can no longer deliver.
One is "I paid for a service" and the other is "I paid for something to help me use a service".
So, no, if Netflix disappeared in this case, I would not ask for a partial refund. The TV still works as a TV, and that's what I really paid for in the first place. (If Netflix didn't disappear, but the TV app stopped working, I might be -- justifiably -- annoyed, though!)
This Twitterific thing is in no way comparable: the app only interacts with Twitter. That's its entire reason for being. If it can't do that, then it is worthless, and anyone who paid for it is perfectly in their rights to demand a refund. Hell, the Twitterific folks should be pro-actively refunding the unused portions of subscriptions; that's the only ethical thing to do here.
Now, if you had dial up and paid a subscription for access to a free phone number and they cut you off before your subscription ended, then yes you absolutely would expect a refund.
And, regardless, if my ISP stopped providing dial-up service, and I really still wanted dial-up service, I would have simply found another ISP to connect to. (After expecting my previous ISP to issue me a pro-rated refund for whatever subscription I was paying them.)
Also regardless, your analogy is bad, as the modem was a one-time cost. The issue at hand is that of recurring subscription fees Twitterific charges. If we were just talking about a one-time cost to buy the Twitterific app, I wouldn't be suggesting the refund that cost (except to customers who just bought the app right before the shutdown, perhaps; seems shitty to keep customer money when the product irreparably breaks a few days after purchase).
You bought a display that exclusively integrates into Netflix, it can only display Netflix content, but you have to pay an annual fee to the display manufacturer for it to continue working.
It's January and you've just paid your annual subscription. But on the 15th of Jan Netflix decides to stop allowing your display manufacturer access, and your display becomes a useless brick.
Having only just paid for your annual subscription you'd want a refund - you're no longer getting access to the service you were paying for.
We can keep coming up with anologys but the fact remains that the app developer guaranteed access to a service which they can no longer provide. It doesn't matter if its an app, a display, or anything else. Your agreement is with the app developer, not Twitter. Your payments go to the app developer, not Twitter. If the app developers entire business is built around hoping Twitter never closes off their access then thats totally on them when things go south.
Yes, they did close down third-party access to their platform, but that is completely not the same as those other things you mention.
I doubt most Twitterific customers have any idea what a third-party API platform is, let alone Twitter's shady history with how they've treated API developers. Your average Twitterific purchaser probably just thinks it's a premium Twitter app that lets them do Twitter things, and would expect that app to continue working as long as Twitter exists. (Which it still does!)
> On any reasonable viewpoint that's a risk accepted by the purchaser, not the app seller.
If your definition for "reasonable" is actually the definition of "unreasonable", sure. Twitterific's customers should not have to take on the consequences of the risk that Twitter would shut down third-party access to their API. That is a risk that Twitterific took on themselves as a risk to their business, and they should have a plan for what to do in this case. And that plan should not be "beg our customers to pay us for not providing a service anymore". It should include them pro-actively refunding the unused portions of any subscriptions (super gross that they didn't do this, double-super gross that they're begging for "donations"), and then responsibly winding the company down (assuming they don't have any other still-viable products that could keep them going). It sucks that they'd have to do this, but that's what can happen when you bet your business on someone else's platform.
If I had been a customer for years and years, obviously my calculation would be different.
Maybe legally, ethically, morally, the renters are SOL, but for me personally, I’m not sure my sympathies would lie with the landlord in that situation.
Just as if I buy an app (or a subscription to one), I expect the app's author to guarantee that it functions for its intended purpose, and return my money if it doesn't.
It was blatantly obvious to any buyer that these clients could only work so long as Twitter allowed it. This wasn’t a hidden risk, so anyone buying a subscription was implicitly accepting that risk as part of their purchase.
The companies providing third party clients had already renegotiated their relationship with Twitter over the past few years, achieving a more stable baseline, API changes, defined escalation routes, etc. Musk's buying of the company and capricious shutting down of third parties without even having the option of having them do things like incorporate adverts is hardly something it was possible to plan for over the long term.
And that's exactly my point! Twitterific should have known that Twitter could pull the rug out from under them at any time, and had a plan to make their customers whole in that eventuality.
Look, I'm not saying a company in their position should have to refund a one-time purchase cost of the app itself (for companies that do that sort of thing). But if you are charging an ongoing subscription for continuing service, and then that service terminates before the end of the subscription period, I think a pro-rated refund is more than fair.
Hell, if Twitter themselves charged a subscription fee for having a Twitter account, I would expect them to give pro-rated refunds to customers if they decided to wind down their business or pivot to something else. Twitterific should be no different here.
This has been stated again and again but you’re choosing to ignore it in your attempt to make the app developers the bad guys in this situation.
Twitterific made a bet that the Twitter API would remain available to them. They should be the ones assuming the risk and taking on the consequences of losing that bet. Not their customers.
It's my understanding that Apple doesn't offer this feature.
Sometimes Apple Dev Relations will help out and mass refund without making all the users request a refund, but they don't always (even when the developer asks).
Twitterific built their business on something that we often acknowledge here as being very shaky: the whim of a third-party platform. If the company hasn't considered and prepared for the scenario where that third-party platform completely cuts off your access, that's irresponsible as a business owner.
Why should the developer? It would be wrong to say "You won't get a refund" but that's not what they're doing.
I wouldn't judge anyone who bought it a month ago for asking for a refund, but if you've been using the app since 2019 or something, you got what you paid for, for years.
You’re raging against these guys for not doing something that they have no ability to do. Hardly fair.
For an industry that makes as much money as it does some people appear to be extremely petty about this, if you could afford the app to begin with you can afford to be gracious about it. If you have any beef it is with Elon Musk, not with Twitterific.
Wow, really? "Refund remainder of 1-year subscription that started on X date and ended prematurely on Y date" seems like a pretty basic feature of a payments system. The inability to do that says more about Apple (or Google) than it does anyone else.
> If you have any beef it is with Elon Musk, not with Twitterific.
I don't have a beef with either, as I don't use my Twitter account, and didn't purchase Twitterific.
People who bought Twitterific and pay for a subscription don't have an ongoing business relationship with Twitter/Musk, they have one with Twitterific. When the company you pay for a subscription service stops providing that service -- for whatever reason, even reasons outside their control -- the right thing to do is for the company to refund the rest of the subscription.
If Twitterific was a one-time purchase and not a subscription service, I would absolutely agree that refunds are probably not warranted. (Though someone who bought the app yesterday might feel differently.)
It's flat-out gross that the Twitterific developer isn't pro-actively giving pro-rated refunds to their customers, and is instead asking for charity.
Please explain the mechanism by which an App Store app developer can provide pro-rated refunds. You seem so confident about your claim that the company could be and should be doing this, that I’m sure this is something you’ve already checked and verified.
But that's not a response to my comment. I'm asking why the developer, who has expenses of his own, should cover for the actions of Twitter. In the absence of an explicit promise related to this, the customer was taking a risk that Twitter would do something like this. There is no good argument that either party should have to cover for Twitter's actions.
Their average customer doesn't know or care about API platforms. They just want to access Twitter via a nice, premium app they paid for. If they can no longer do that, they deserve a refund of the remaining unused value of their subscription.
To put it another way - if the shareholders had had a nine-figure exit, would they have planned on sharing that with their customers?
But we're talking about a company that provided a service that people were paying for, and now no longer provides that service. Any unused portion of any subscription bought should absolutely be refunded. It's actually a bit gross that the company is not pro-actively refunding subscriptions. They made a bet that Twitter's API would always remain available to them; it's not on their customers to bear any cost for the failure of that bet.
(It does seem from other responses here that doing so is just not possible on Apple's payments platform. That's pretty lame of Apple, IMO, but oh well.)
Is just an appeal and makes the choice clear.
Likely, some customers that did purchase it have received some value; It's likely the difference between needing to claim bankruptcy protection and quietly dissolving
They're a software business that relied on a third-party platform for their entire business model. It genuinely sucks that this business model has been yanked out from under them, but this is something they should have planned for (especially considering Twitter's past actions around their API and developer program), without a lame request to their now-former customers to give them free money for no service provided.
I'm sure some customers will, out of the excessive goodness of their hearts, riding on the good experience they had over the years with the app, honor that appeal. That's certainly their choice. But it's also reasonable for the rest of us to think that the appeal alone feels a bit dirty.
Assumptions about their bank balance and 'that's business' are the wrong way to approach this.
given this, it was certainly within their control to attempt to negotiate a contract with their only supplier and then they would have contractual guarantees about not being summarily cut off
(would musk have cut them off? probably, but then they could go after him)
without that the business model was always based on chance
they knew this, and continued to sell the product regardless
And good luck negotiating anything with a billion dollar company, they'll be happy to stiff you if they want to but in the meantime you are beholden to the terms of the contract. This because they typically have legal staff and you probably don't so there is a huge asymmetry in any kind of legal tussle with them.
(1) Exactly what did the user pay for?
If it's an app that promises to provide access to Twitter, then I'd think the app developer is responsible for making the necessary arrangements with Twitter to uphold that promise.
If it's an app that promises to make a best-effort attempt to use Twitter's public APIs, then a refund doesn't sound reasonable.
(2) Should the user consider this a simple business relationship, or something more personal? I.e., even if a case could be made for a refund, should that matter?
Remember, if Musk puts you out of work, you're a refugee, but if anyone else puts you out of work, you're merely unfortunate.
Regarding fault: Twitterific absolutely shares responsibility here. They built an app and service that depended on the whims of a third-party service that they could not guarantee perpetual access to. They should have had a plan for what to do if they lost API access... and not a plan that begs their paying customers for charity.
Source?
Wouldn't a fair solution be to offer a partial refund, proportional to time that subscribers paid for but are unable to use?
I understand that many people are angry about recent Twitter changes. This rightly so, because many 3rd party apps are obviously a huge time investment and people have bought apps. This seems unjust.
However, with all the recent disclosures about Twitter shadowbanning, deboosting, deamplifying, banning, and viewpoint censoring, I cannot help but feel that Twitter has always been capricious.
It is only now that we are recognizing it : the unfortunate reality that a private company controls a defacto public square.
I think they are both controlling, but yes, the current regime appears much more viewpoint neutral.
> I don’t think asking a tiny % of twitter users to use their products interfaces instead of third parties is very controlling, but shadow banning, and censoring topics is incredibly.
Disagree here, because tools are built upon this. So, it might be more accurate to say Twitter 3rd party Devs & Twitter Ecosystem Devs, not users.
I think the viewpoint controlling and censoring is more so; HN does some of the same things I am afraid to see (yes, to a much smaller audience, but same tactics).